The Threshold is a series of conversations with writers from the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award.
Read the opening editorial, “What a Story Costs.”
I first encountered Morsal Yakuby through the Gallery’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. Her migration story, Thoughts of a Distant Night, received the Honourable Mention from the jury. I sat with her to talk about what it had cost her to share that story, and what it had given her. What follows is hers.
Watch The Whole Conversation
Watch the full conversation with Morsal Yakuby and go behind the scenes of her award-winning story, Thoughts of a Distant Night. Learn how it took shape, what she wrestled with, and what she chose to keep. We’ve also laid out the conversation in more detail below.
Her mother spoke about the war the way someone else might describe the weather. A person shot here. A body carried past there. God’s plan, she would say. Move on.
Morsal Yakuby grew up in Toronto listening to these stories. Born in Afghanistan, raised in the west end of the city, she moved between two worlds with no clean border between them — her mother’s Farsi at home, English everywhere else, and a silence around the past that nobody had named as silence.
She carried those stories for years. Then she wrote them down.
Between two languages, between two ways of grieving
Morsal is careful about the word “immigrant.”
“I don’t consider myself an immigrant, per se,” she says. “I grew up in Toronto.”
And yet the distance between her upbringing and her family’s world was real, and it was felt, even if no one spoke its name. Her parents came from Afghanistan. Her mother, who had lived through war, arrived in Canada carrying everything she’d seen—and she carried it lightly, at least on the surface. Shootings. Attacks. People gone. She would recount these things over a meal, without ceremony, folding them into ordinary conversation. It was disturbing to Morsal, not because her mother was broken, but because she wasn’t performing any distress at all. Death had become weather.
Morsal tried to talk to her about getting support. She had grown up in a place where therapy was a language, where naming what had happened to you was considered part of surviving it. Her mother regarded this with something between scepticism and dismissal. Western ideas, she seemed to suggest. Not how we do things.
And so Morsal held both positions at once: the daughter who understood her mother’s world, and the daughter who could not accept what that world had asked her mother to absorb without flinching.
That gap—between two ways of knowing, two ways of grieving, two ways of surviving—is the ground her writing stands on.
Getting it out of her head
She had been carrying these stories for a long time before she decided to write them. Not just her own—her mother’s stories, her uncles’ stories, all the things said casually across dinner tables and phone calls and quiet evenings that had lodged somewhere inside her and never fully left.
“I’ve been carrying around that kind of stories for ages and ages,” she says.
Writing them was not an act of closure. It was closer to an act of release — not a full release, but enough to feel the weight shift. She also wrote because she believed it mattered for others to read. That someone else might be sitting with something similar—a family’s unspeakable history, a culture that had no word for what they’d survived—and might find in her story a permission they hadn’t known they were waiting for.
What it cost to write it
She does not describe the writing process as cathartic. The word she returns to is “taxing.” Incredibly taxing. Tiring.
To write her mother’s story, she had to go back into it—to retrieve specific memories from decades of accumulated telling, to reconstruct scenes she had half-forgotten, and to sit with the weight of things she had spent years learning to set down. At some point, she could not continue alone. She asked her husband to edit the remainder of the manuscript. Not out of doubt, but because the mental energy required had simply run out. She had given the story everything she had.
The story she submitted carries more than her own voice. Her mother is the primary presence. Her uncles move through it too, their experiences threaded in. It is, in this way, a document of a family’s migration—not only across geography, but across time and silence and the distance between what was survived and what could be said.
After the words were out
Morsal is a private person. She did not circulate the published piece widely among her family. But she felt proud. Quietly, steadily proud—in the way that comes not from recognition but from having done something that was difficult and real.
Something else happened too. Writing the story made it easier to paint. Morsal is a visual artist, and the act of naming her family’s experience in words seemed to loosen something in her hands. The pain she had been circling in language, she could now explore through paint—through portraits, through distorted faces, through images that ask the question she has been asking her whole life: how do I see myself, and how do others see me?
Identity, she says, is something she paints in faces that are not quite human. Not because she feels less than human, but because the self, for someone raised between cultures, is rarely a clean or stable reflection. It tilts. It distorts. It is always partly a portrait someone else drew first.
What she would say to you
Ask Morsal what she would say to someone sitting with a story they aren’t sure is worth telling, and she answers without hesitation.
“Everybody should tell their stories,” she says. “Whether they are a migrant or a fully Westernized person. Everybody has interesting stories.”
She is not speaking about therapy or processing or growth, exactly. She is speaking about something older: the human need to be witnessed and to witness in return. She has loved stories her whole life—reading them, hearing them, and learning from the shape of someone else’s experience. No human, she says, passes through life without some form of trauma. The degree varies. What we do with it varies. But it is always there, and it always marks us, and the question is only whether we carry it alone or hand it, carefully, to someone else. “That’s how humans begin to learn and grow.”
For Morsal, the handing over took two forms: a written story and a canvas. The words, when they ran out, became colour. The faces she couldn’t fully name, she painted instead.
Her mother is still her mother. The war is still the war. But the stories, now, belong to more than just one family’s kitchen table. They belong to the community that receives them—and in that act of receiving and taking care, something shifts.
Morsal Yakuby received the Honourable Mention in the Gallery of Human Migration’s inaugural Migration Literary Award. Her story, Thoughts of a Distant Night, can be read here.
The Tapestry, the 2026 edition of the Gallery’s Migration Literary Award, is now open for submissions.
**Deadline: August 31, 2026.**